Insights & Trends

Dr Roto ran a Fantasy Sports channel on YouTube for four years, published more than 500 videos, and earned $0 from them. The channel followed all the rules. It just never got into the YouTube Partner Program, which shares ad revenue only after 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in 12 months.

If your track has a few seconds of someone else's recording in it, you need permission to release it. That's true even if you never sampled anything yourself and the sample came inside a beat you leased. Without that permission, your distributor can reject the track, Spotify can take it down and hold its royalties, and YouTube's Content ID can send its income to whoever owns the original.

Running a channel as a company was the theme VidSummit 2026 kept coming back to. Spy Ninjas, Topper Guild and Sean Cannell spent their sessions on hiring, building a team and the expensive mistakes along the way. And five platforms besides YouTube were on the program, from Facebook monetization workshops to a closing keynote about Jordan Matter's deal with Netflix.

If you run a label, your catalog already earns on YouTube. Fans upload lyric videos, edits and Shorts with your artists' recordings every day. Without Content ID, the label sees none of that money.